Old guy here, trying to have some nostalgic fun with my kid, but I have used an emulator or rom since 1998.....just a little different now.
Got MAME 241, a few of what I believe are merged roms and got them to work.
But wanted a nicer interface for a young kid to understand so I got MAMEUI and that was fine, was even able to make pacman work instead of puckman
Then got launchbox and set it up. Took a bit to understand but hacked my way through and got about half of the roms to work. However, not understanding a few things.
1. How do I get pacman instead of puckman? All P/C files are inside the merged zip file and when I try the alternate options inside editing in launchbox it just opens the zip file instead of launching pacman. However, I was able to fix the fact that launchbox viewed Ivan Stewart off-road and the track pack version as the same game by spliting and then changing to the correct reference number for the original game.
2. If I got a full rom set, how do I get a no-intro xml file to check against? There is no "MAME" option under operating systems and I can't find anything on google that explains how to get an arcade xml list
3. If all I can find is a merged set, should I use clrmamepro to split or unmerge it? Would this fix the problem in #1?
Thanks, and links to GOOD tutorials are welcomed as I don't know shell or python or any of the fancy stuff people expect you to know in most of what I am finding.